30 May 2019 at 5pm

Ireland never features in traditional accounts of the European Renaissance. It’s easy to see why: while literature and the arts flourished elsewhere, all that happened in Ireland during the late 16th & early 17th centuries, it seems, was war, rebellion, famine, defeat and plantation. True, newcomers – often the agents of the Tudor conquest – brought with them offshoots of other people’s Renaissance: Edmund Spenser wrote 'The Faerie Queene', the great Elizabethan epic, in a planter castle in North Cork; Sir George Carew turned the first part of Ercilla’s 'La Araucana' into a military handbook geared to defeating Irish insurgents; and Sir John Harington translated Ariosto’s 'Orlando Furioso' in the interval between colonial adventures in Ireland. But what of the Irish themselves? Where are they in this narrative? This lecture argues that only by adding the rich culture of Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland to the mix – not to mention the defiantly hybrid culture of the English Pale – can we get begin to recognise the complexity and dynamism of Ireland in the Renaissance and get a more unified sense of its convulsive entry into modernity.